Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick is to be translated into Japanese
emoticons using the crowd-sourcing power of the internet.

Thousands of people will be paid small sums to translate portions of the original 1851 text into Emoji, the picture character language widely used in Japanese SMS messages.

While the premise of the project – titled Emoji Dick – may be whimsical, it highlights the innovative ways in which the labour pool of bored internet users is being tapped to complete complex tasks.

Fred Benenson, the New York-based web product manager behind the idea, has launched an online appeal to raise $3,500 to pay for the crowd-source translation.

The translators will be recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online labour exchange where firms advertise menial work that cannot be done by computers.

Because there is no standard English-to-Emoji dictionary, Mr Benenson plans to solicit several alternative translations from which the final version will be assembled.

"Each of Moby Dick's 6,438 sentences will be translated three times by different Amazon Mechanical Turk workers," he wrote on the appeal website.

"Those results will then be voted on by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence will be selected for inclusion in the book."

Anyone who contributes $10 will have their name and an Emoji sentence of their choice printed at the back of the book when it is published, while a donation of $200 or more entitles the supporter to a limited edition colour hard back version.

As of 2pm on Wednesday the project had attracted 19 backers who had together pledged $641. The $3,500 target must be reached by Oct 19 or the project will be abandoned.

Melville's heavily symbolic book tracks the struggle of a whaleship crew led by Captain Ahab against the ferocious sperm whale Moby Dick. It is often described as "the great American novel".